Academy awards & a missing Homeland

Yet another Oscar season is upon us and there isn’t a single movie from the world’s most prolific filmdom in the scroll of honours. We produce a thousand movies a year, perhaps more than all other countries put together, and we don’t land one Academy Award nomination. Oh, wait … there’s Life of Pi, whose Indian story and actors will be talked up by film journalists looking for some desi angle. And Reliance Entertainment is coproducer of the decidedly American Lincoln. Then there’s Silver Linings Playbook, also up for Best Picture, which has Anupam Kher playing a shrink, a change from the clownish Bollywood role he was reduced to. And Zero Dark Thirty was shot in India. Wowie, perhaps some other film has an Indian light boy or a make-up artiste or assistant to costume designer? Such is the straits we are reduced to — scavenging the credits for some remote Indian connection.

Truth is we are a no-show at the Oscars. We don’t even figure in the foreign film category, where the five nominations this year are from Austria, Norway, Chile, Denmark and Canada. How is it that Chile, which probably makes couple of dozen movies a year, lands up on Academy night, while we, home to the most fecund movie industry in the world, are still groping around for an “Indian connection” ? Why, I asked friends on a social media billboard . Answers ranged from the “pure rubbish” we produce , to “our genre is different”, to “we always send the wrong picture”.

One friend suggested chari tably that we make films for our audience; after all, how many Oscar-nominated films are there in our award functions? Well, perhaps that speaks for our insular taste. Another, who said he has been involved in two Oscar campaigns for Indian nominations, spoke of a lack of resources, poor communication strategy etc. Not convincing. Peru, Vietnam, Cuba, Macedonia are not exactly on top of the game. Is it possible that we just don’t make great films? Is it likely we live in our own make-believe world and are out of touch with the rest?

One of the dangers of having a large, thriving domestic market is that there is no compelling need to benchmark ourselves against the best in the world or meet global standards. Our producers can thrive in their own orthodoxy on everything from the bicycles we manufacture to the movies we make and still rake in lolly because our market hasn’t seen anything better. I was often reminded of this when friends would speak of how India is starting to have “world-class ” roads, bridges and other infrastructure while pointing to efforts that would be barely passable in the post-World War west and is being bettered all the time in Africa and Latin America.

But once we see world class products — and the Academy Award showcases the best talent, not just from the US, but from across the globe — we are left wringing our hands at our mediocrity (with some rare exceptions). We then make excuses about why this is so: we are different in our tastes, genres, outlook etc, to the resigned catch-all “we are like that only” . Our lack of impact or strike rate at the Academy Awards is worth noting because this is one sphere where we claim bragging rights. We have the money, the manpower, the technology, the skill, but we can’t make an Oscar winning movie. Imagine if we had the most prodigiously talented cricket team, the money, the infrastructure, the fan base, but we never won the World Cup.

All of which brings me to a TV drama called Homeland that I devoured over Christmas. Not being a TV junkie, I’d missed its first two seasons on Showtime, but the holiday week was a good time to catch up a genre — spy craft — that has never really gone out of vogue. A few plots in Homeland are decidedly dodgy, but overall the series is so well made that one ended up watching several hour-long episodes back-to-back . Small wonder the series bagged a clutch of Emmys and Golden Globes in 2012 and is renewed for a third season in 2013. Indian viewers will get to see the first two seasons starting January 16.

Homeland’s two main stars are Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), a CIA operations officer who suffers from a bipolar disorder, and Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), a US Marine who returns home after eight years as an al-Qaeda prisoner of war. One shouldn’t give the plot away, but suffice it to say the two principals and a cast of dozen characters, woven together by a byzantine storyline but brilliant screenplay, held America (and anywhere in the world where it has been shown) in thrall for months. Watching it, one couldn’t help wondering if our own region (India-Pakistan , particularly given the recent flare-up ) didn’t have similarly rich material for our filmdom to work with.

Indeed, a few days after watching Homeland, your hapless correspondent stumbled on a film called Ek Tha Tiger. Twenty minutes into the tortured effort, even allowing for the license a masala movie can take, it became clear why you won’t see anyone from Bollywood on the Academy Awards stage any time soon. The first step towards getting better in the movie business is for the Indian industry to rid itself of its self-inflated notions of its strengths, and acknowledge it has a long way to go.